Clues, but no firm answers in King’s path to infamy

Jasper County Sheriff Capt. James Carter stands outside the Byrd family home where on June he went with then-sheriff Billy Rowles to tell the family of James Byrd, Jr.'s death. Capt. Carter had known the family since childhood. He was also among those to arrest John William King, with whom his own children had been friends and playmates. In the aftermath of the incident, he was pivotal many say in keeping the peace in Jasper. Photo taken Tuesday, April 16, 2019 Kim Brent/The Enterprise

Jasper County Sheriff Capt. James Carter stands outside the Byrd family home where on June he went with then-sheriff Billy Rowles to tell the family of James Byrd, Jr.'s death. Capt. Carter had known the family

Jasper County Sheriff Capt. James Carter stands outside the Byrd family home where on June he went with then-sheriff Billy Rowles to tell the family of James Byrd, Jr.'s death. Capt. Carter had known the family since childhood. He was also among those to arrest John William King, with whom his own children had been friends and playmates. In the aftermath of the incident, he was pivotal many say in keeping the peace in Jasper. Photo taken Tuesday, April 16, 2019 Kim Brent/The Enterprise

Jasper County Sheriff Capt. James Carter stands outside the Byrd family home where on June he went with then-sheriff Billy Rowles to tell the family of James Byrd, Jr.'s death. Capt. Carter had known the family

For 20 minutes after he was sentenced to die, John William “Bill” King wasn’t simply a symbol of racial hatred and evil.

His heartbroken father, sitting in a wheelchair with an oxygen tube in his nose, had urged a Jasper County jury not to give his son the death penalty. But the jurors — 11 white and one black — decided otherwise, deliberating for just three hours before recommending execution.

After ordering the sentence, state District Judge Joe Bob Golden did something he had not done previously in the trial. He allowed Bill King, 24, to spend 20 minutes with his dad, Ronald King, 69, before being taken away back to jail and then to death row.

“The entire 20 minutes, Bill wouldn’t take his hand off of his father,” the Rev. Ron Foshage recalled. “He just kept rubbing Ronald’s arm and then his leg. He knelt beside him … a father and son. Bill became that little boy who loved without hate.”

Because at one time, Foshage added, Bill King was “just a boy.”

* * *

The man set to die Wednesday night in Huntsville for one of Texas’ most awful murders was adopted at 2 months of age and raised in Jasper by Ronald and Jean King.

As a child, those who know him from that time say, he made friends with ease.

“My boys liked him,” said Capt. James Carter, an African-American man who grew up in Jasper and has served the Jasper County Sheriff’s Office for 30 years. “He came and spent the night with us often.”

King and Carter’s own two children were “just boys doing what boys do,” he said. They wrestled in the front yard, played ball, explored the neighborhood.

“I treated him like my own," Carter said.

On June 7, 1998, it fell to Carter and his boss to tell the family of James Byrd Jr. that three men — Bill King, Shawn Berry and Lawrence Russell Brewer — had chained Byrd, 49, to the bumper of a truck and dragged him three miles down a country road. It was a modern-day lynching that shocked the nation.

The Byrd family’s pastor recalls how hard the news fell on the dead man’s mother.

“She couldn’t believe how horrific it was, her son’s last minutes here on Earth being dragged,” said the Rev. Kenneth Lyons of Greater New Bethel Baptist Church. “And the reports said he tried to ... you could see where his hands had been scarred as they were dragging him.”

Eyes closed, Lyons lightly raked his fingernails across the table as he spoke.

“And they just kept dragging him. How could another man do that to a human being?”

* * *

Among those who had a different recollection of Bill King before the horrific Byrd murder — a crime that inspired hate-crime legislation in Texas and nationally — is Louis Berry.

He knew Bill King as his younger brother Shawn Berry’s good friend.

“Ol’ Bill,” folks would say, according to Berry, “he’ll give you the shirt off his back. I bet they made that saying after him.”

“Kids were just kids back then,” added Paul Brister, who was with the Jasper Police Department at the time of the slaying. “There was no internet, no cell phones, no online stuff. Teenagers just rode around town, they went to the movies, hung out at the movie theater and the skating rink.”

Jasper Twin Cinema, once a popular spot, closed in 2013, leaving behind a dilapidated building on South Fletcher Street.

Shawn Berry worked there. Police found a tire from Berry’s Ford pickup there. It was used as evidence in the trials.

“I never knew (Bill) to be racist until after he was in Beto,” Louis Berry said.

He wasn’t the only one to remark on the change that seemed to occur at the George Beto I Unit near Palestine in the late ’90s. At 20 years old, a series of burglaries had sent King to prison for the first time.

“To be honest, he was just a guy committing crimes,” said Mike Wilson, lead investigator with the Jasper County District Attorney’s Office during the trials.

“He wasn’t a very good criminal,” Wilson said. “He was running with the wrong crowd as he got into his late teens. His dad tried to get him on the right track. Just a typical good kid gone bad.”

Foshage pegs the beginning of King’s downward spiral to his 16th birthday, the day his mother died.

“Ronald told me that Jean spoiled him,” the priest said. “She doted on him. They were very close. He was devastated. I know he missed her terribly.”

King began “veering off,” Carter said. His two children distanced themselves, and others followed.

“The kids backed off of him,” Carter said. “The kids in the neighborhood backed off of him. Even his friends. The friend he had (Berry) … you see what happened.”

King’s first arrest was in 1992, and he got 10 years’ probation for burglary of a building. Another burglary that same year put him in prison for three months. A second probation violation in 1995 sent him to the Beto Unit.

“That’s where he met Brewer and they decided to form their own branch of the KKK or some group like that,” Wilson said.

King was paroled in June 1997. The self-described “exalted cyclops” of the Confederate Knights of America left prison with a body full of tattoos. One depicted a black man hanging from a tree. He returned home and moved into an apartment with Shawn Berry.

Two months later, Brewer left Beto and headed for Jasper to find his former cellmate.

In the small, one-bedroom apartment near the local Walmart, King introduced Berry — a young man with a 1982 Ford pickup — and Brewer, a white supremacist paroled with what officials termed an “unidentified mental illness.”

Less than a year later, their names became inextricably linked. Eight months after King was tried, convicted and sentenced to death, Brewer also received the death penalty. Berry was sentenced to life in prison.

* * *

For the most part, Ronald King attended his son’s capital murder trial alone. His wife was gone; his three other children had cut ties with their brother.

“I cry a lot,” Ronald King told The Enterprise in 1999. “I’m lost myself. I don’t know where I stand. I’m going through something I never expected to go through.”

Another family in the courtroom understood his struggle.

“The Byrd family was so kind to Ronald,” Foshage said. “Every day after the trial had ended for the day, Mr. Byrd and other members of the Byrd family would touch Ronald on the arm as they were leaving. He was so grateful for their kindness.”

At one of the trials, Byrd’s father took Ronald King’s hand.

“We as parents raise our children to do the right thing and not hate,” said Louvon Harris, James Byrd Jr.’s older sister. “But once they’re not in your control anymore, we’re not sure what kids will grow up to be.

“There were no winners in this. We felt their pain, as well.”

Even as evidence uncovered Byrd’s blood on shoes found in King’s apartment and cigarettes at the crime scene with King’s DNA, Ronald King stood by his son. After the verdict, the man suffering from emphysema made sure his child had access to a radio, a television and stamps in prison.

“He was doing without medicine that he desperately needed so Bill could have these things,” Foshage said.

King reportedly had several tantrums in the months surrounding the trial — sometimes over his court-appointed attorneys, sometimes over the jailers, and sometimes for no reason at all.

During one fit, he smashed the radio against the wall.

* * *

Ronald King died at Jasper Nursing and Rehabilitation nine months before Brewer was executed in 2011. Before his death, he bought a plot for his son in the Jasper City Cemetery.

The bodies of whites and blacks had been buried separately since the 1830s. Days before King’s trial began, members of the community gathered in peace and prayer to tear down the fence that segregated the graveyard.

By Wednesday, King will be asked to decide whether he wants his remains brought back to Jasper, interred in the plot his father bought for him.

If they are, he’ll be buried next to his parents and just 100 yards from James Byrd Jr.